


Mark Up

by cereal



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-26
Updated: 2013-10-26
Packaged: 2017-12-30 13:19:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1019083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cereal/pseuds/cereal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Torchwoods most wayward consultants, flipping a coin to see who stays home with their daughter, and who adds another thousand frequent flier points to the bucket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mark Up

**Author's Note:**

> [Allison](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com) wrote [two](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/post/44873393509/rosetenforever-the-doctor-and-rose-tyler) [sets](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/post/44867851099/abadplanwellexecuted-the-doctors-rose-by) of separate tags over on Tumblr, and my brain spit them out as this.
> 
> * * *

It’s a schedule they find on accident and a routine they develop deliberately.

They’re easy targets, the both of them, planet-threatening danger and it’s hardly even a question – one of them will go, one of them will always help.

Torchwood’s most wayward consultants, flipping a coin to see who stays home with their daughter, and who adds another thousand frequent flier points to the bucket.

They have more than they could ever spend, and they’d both trade them all to stay home, to stay together, but together’s no good if the Earth comes apart.

So they go, taking turns and too many goodbyes, and their daughter, laughing, crying, clinging to the one left behind.

She’s a piece of both them, a flurry of limbs and wild blonde hair, brown eyes and a devastating toddler grin, bright and wide and his and hers.

It’s only the second trip, lying in bed before his early morning zeppelin departure, that he points it out.

“Well, you have her,” he says, and it’s mid conversation, mid afterglow, mid the regrets that he’s leaving at all. “You have her, to keep me with you.”

And she can’t let it get serious, can’t indulge that tone in his voice, can’t think about the emotions at all, or she’ll beg him to stay.

And he will, and he can’t.

“Well, you have that,” she says, and she points to the hickey on his shoulder, the mark where she bit down when it got to be too much, the Doctor and his skin and his hands and the solid, rough movements of his hips. “You have that to keep me with you.”

He grins. “Make it darker,” he says. She does.

From then, a pact, a promise, a reminder, signed and sealed with a kiss, meant so very literally.

It’s not always as natural though, not always in the course of things, but they make it work, they get it done.

Ducking into the kitchen at the Tyler mansion, Rose pulling her collar down, the Doctor with teeth and lips and nice, sharp suction, while the team waits to leave in the foyer.

Twin blurs of pink and yellow, a little hand held in a bigger one for a mad dash across a zeppelin port, and Pete Tyler averting his granddaughter’s eyes when they reach the Doctor at the gate.

A row that lasts an entire car trip, right up to the drop-off point, and a red and purple bruise on his neck this time, when usually they keep their signatures hidden. _**Mine**_ , it says, and Laura from field research reads it clearly.

There comes a day when the reminders aren’t big enough, when their daughter stands at the front door sobbing for her mother. Rose delays her flight, and they buy a marker, the most indelible one in the whole shop.

Then: their daughter writes, a hand, a shoulder, a forearm, a leg, wherever she wants and whatever she wants. A new spot, a new language, for each mission.

(The Doctor tells her once that he covers those drawing with plasters in hotel showers to make them last the whole trip.

Rose covers hers with shower caps and rubber bands.)

It’s a cycle they repeat for the rest of their lives, ink fading into skin, skin holding back blood, blood called to a bruise with the force of a mouth.

These are the marks of their family, and they run deep in their veins.

* * *


End file.
